In 1997, not long after I had first arrived in Moscow, my friend Sergei told me about the Diggers. They were a group of sensitive, educated people who had turned their backs on modern life and retreated to the network of tunnels and secret bunkers beneath the city. There they had formed a new society that was fairer and more just than the surface one. It was dark, beautiful, surreal – precisely the kind of world I wanted to live in.
I was reminded of a documentary on the homeless of Manhattan I had seen a few years earlier. According to that film, a number of the city’s dispossessed had retreated underground, where they had formed their own shadow settlement. It was like something out of a 1970s science-fiction apocalypse movie: a parallel civilisation developing in darkness beneath the golden monuments to avarice and ambition above.
With Moscow being the size it was, why, there had to be someone living down there. But what I really liked about Sergei’s story was this: these ‘Diggers’ had chosen to go underground. They had not been driven there by homelessness or indigence or madness. They were intellectuals and artists, carving out something new, by choice.
I wanted to know more. But the more I pushed, the more the details began to recede from me. Sergei had seen them on TV; they existed; they had a leader. That was all he could say. The programme hadn’t lasted very long, and he’d only seen it by chance, anyway. He’d switched it on hoping for Dorozhny Patrol, the show that detailed all the deaths and fires in the city that day. It was an interesting programme, after all: it showed lots of pictures of mangled corpses, and always ended with a scorecard listing the number of homicides.
A year later I left Moscow. But all the time I was away I thought about getting back. And I had a plan. Once I returned, I’d make contact with the Diggers. I wouldn’t join, that would be going too far; but I’d befriend them, and thus gain access to their secret world. I might spend about six months down there, studying their rites and rituals, then write about my experiences.
But even before I returned to Moscow, the practicalities were troubling me. I couldn’t be sure the Diggers would accept me; and even if they did, well, my Russian wasn’t great. How would I be able to record their rites and stories in any detail? I tried to picture myself down there but all I could imagine was wandering up and down sewers all day. What would I actually do? How would I eat? What if I caught some lethal virus? What if I was attacked by giant radioactive rats?
Still, I didn’t give up. When I met Sergei again I reminded him of the topic. ‘Do you know how I could get in touch with the Diggers?’
‘With who?’
‘The Diggers.’
‘Who?’
‘The people living under Moscow.’
‘Oh no, they don’t live there,’
‘Eh?’
‘They live on the surface, in flats, like everybody else.’ There was a smile on his face that said, How naïve of you.
‘But I thought …’
‘No, it’s just a hobby. Well, maybe there are one or two who live underground all the time, but I doubt it …’
So that was that. For two years I’d nurtured my belief in these subterranean dwellers, in the contralogical poetry of their existence. They’d given me hope that it was possible to step outside society, the world of work, of leisure, of money and to live according to your own rules without starving to death. Who wants to sit in an office, eat food, watch TV every day? Not me. It was hard to give that hope up.
And so I didn’t. Moscow was vast, cruel, phantasmagorical. It held so many mysteries, so many secrets … there had to be someone living down there.